Reading Eagle: Bill Uhrich |
Lourdes Torres, a longtime resident of the Fifth and Pine streets area of Reading, spearheads the Bingaman Park Neighborhood Association work to keep the area clean and crime free; very strict when it comes to trash, loitering, loud music and drugs, she says.

Reading Eagle: Jeremy Drey |
The Bingaman Park Neighborhood Association hopes to improve the quality of life for its fellow south Reading residents.

Torres, 66, rents a storefront at Fifth and Pine, a few doors from her home where she raised four children, as the base of operations for the Bingaman Park Neighborhood Association.

Some of the other members, mostly older, longtime residents, chip in to help her with the rent.

The group keeps in close contact with the city codes department, reporting properties that are allowed to slide by their owners.

"I'm very strict when it comes to trash, loitering, loud music and drugs," Torres said. "Plus, there's two schools here and I work at the schools (as a teacher's aide) and I just love children."

South Reading, sometimes referred to as "south of Penn", is bound by Penn Street, South Ninth Street and the Schuylkill River.

Reading Eagle: Jeremy Drey |
Frank Bryson is a staple in the south Reading community. He attends a Bingaman Park Neighborhood Association meeting in October.

Ethnicity in its history

Members of the Bingaman Park group say their neighborhood might not be what it once was, but they don't plan to move anytime soon. For one thing, they couldn't get enough from the sale of their homes to buy a mid-level house in the suburbs.

And like Torres, they're comfortable where they are.

"It's still a comfortable neighborhood and we don't have much in the way of serious crime," said Frank Bryson, 88, who has lived in his home in the 300 block of South Fifth Street for nearly 50 years. "We have nuisance crimes but we very rarely have anything really serious, you know, like murders or assaults or things like that."

Unlike east Reading, which was mostly occupied during the last century by residents of Polish descent, south Reading was never a homogeneous neighborhood.

"The city was stratified south of Penn Street," said Al Shaulis, who grew up on Pearl Street, between Fifth and Sixth streets, in the 1960s. "The ethnic groups clustered around their churches."

As a boy, Shaulis' family attended St. Cyril & Methodius Catholic Church, 449 S. Sixth St., which was designated by the diocese as Reading's Slovak Church. He took gymnastics in the gymnasium of the Slovak Catholic Sokol, a Slovak athletic and fraternal organization across the street from the church on Laurel Street.

A couple of blocks away, on South Eight Street was the Catholics' Lithuanian church, St. Anthony, which closed early this century.

At Sixth and Laurel Streets was Nativity of BVM Ukrainian Catholic Church, which moved out of its gold-domed church in 2016 and relocated to the city's Millmont section.

From his childhood home, Shaulis could hear the singing of "pretty vibrant choirs" from nearby black Protestant churches in his neighborhood, including St. James Chapel Church of God in Christ, 11 S. Ninth St.

Some of the churches no longer exist.

Reading Eagle: Bill Uhrich |
Al Shaulis of Exeter Township at his parish, St. Cyril & Methodius Church at Sixth and Laurel streets. The church has long been and continues to function as the focus for activities south of Penn Street.

Big changes '60s to '80s

Shaulis left Reading for the Army in 1967. He met his wife, Kathy, who lived in Philadelphia, at the New Jersey shore, and while they were courting, Kathy commuted to Reading by train on weekends while attending nursing school.

One of Al's uncles would pick her up at the Franklin Street Station and take her to Al's home.

They returned to Berks County in 1988, when Al, a helicopter pilot, retired from the Army.

The city, including Al's old neighborhood, was much different than they remembered.

For one thing, the Franklin Street Station had ceased operating as a train station because passenger service between Reading and Philadelphia was discontinued.

And vehicular traffic no longer rolled up Bingaman Street from the Bingaman Street Bridge. A redevelopment project in the 1970s re-aligned the lanes coming off the bridge to South Fifth Street, lining it up with Laurel Street instead of Bingaman Street, which was made a one-way street.

But the changes went beyond infrastructure.

The expansive, two-story South Reading Market House, once a vibrant hub in the South Reading community where residents would buy meat and produce from area farmers, was a shell of its past self, operating as a warehouse.

The city-owned swimming pool on South Seventh Street, where Al Shaulis and countless other children learned to swim, had closed.

The neighborhood seemed less vibrant.

"South Sixth Street was always a pretty nice street, but the buildings had really deteriorated," he said. "The people who owned them had died off and left their homes to their children, who didn't live there. Some had rented them out."

St. Peter church is hub

But his old church, St. Cyril & Methodius Roman Catholic, stood as a beacon, as it does today.

The Shaulises remain active in St. Cyril's, which is no longer a parish of its own after being absorbed into the parish of St. Peter the Apostle Roman Catholic Church, 326 S. Fifth St., in 2016.

Shaulis is a firm believer in something Frank McCracken, a past city councilman and former pastor of St. James Chapel, previously said about the importance of churches in a neighborhood.

"Frank's point was: If you keep the churches active you have a stable neighborhood," Shaulis said.

Reading Eagle: Lauren A. Little |
Monsignor Thomas J. Orsulak delivers the homily at St Cyril & Methodius. A hundred years ago, when people came from Europe, ethnic parishes were founded and named as such," Orsulak says.

St. Cyril's, 449 S. Sixth St., serves today as a worship site of the St. Peter parish.

St. Peter the Apostle is one of the oldest Catholic churches in the country, older than any Catholic church in New York and the nation itself, said Monsignor Thomas J. Orsulak, who serves as pastor of both St. Peter and St. Cyril.

Founded in 1752 by German settlers, St. Peter "has been kind of a gateway, a door into the city of Reading, where immigrants have been then settling and moving out of the city," Orsulak said.

But it was something like the game of musical chairs that St. Peter came to be Reading's de facto Latino church.

"A hundred years ago, when people came from Europe, ethnic parishes were founded and named as such," Orsulak explained. "However, no parish was officially designated as a Latino or Hispanic parish."

"In some way, either officially or unofficially, because these other parishes had ethnic makeups, Hispanics were told to go to these territorial churches."

The church rectory serves as a portal to connect Latino immigrants with information and services. It provides bilingual and Spanish-only Masses at St. Peter's to go with English-only Masses at St. Cyril's.

Reading Eagle: Jeremy Drey |
The Bingaman Park Neighborhood Association hopes to improve the quality of life for their fellow south Reading residents.

55 years in one place

The proximity of schools and markets drew Candido Rojas and his wife, Aida, to South Reading more than a half century ago.

The Rojases were only the second family of color - and the first Latino family - in the neighborhood when they bought a home in the 500 block of Laurel Street in 1962 shortly after they married.

"There was a black family next to the corner store," Candido Rojas, 83, recalled. "He was a carpenter, she worked at the Social Security office. Everyone else was white, of Polish or eastern European descent, all the way from the Bingaman Street Bridge to Ninth Street."

Rojas came to Reading following the September 1960 floods in eastern Puerto Rico.

He followed his older brother and they worked as pot washers at The Abraham Lincoln hotel before he landed a job with Birdsboro Steel Corp., where he worked in the foundry for 27 years.

He later retired from the Reading School District, working in the maintenance department.

Rojas recalled that when he approached the real estate agent who lived nearby about buying the house that would become his home, she needed to get permission from the other residents before she would take his offer to the seller.

That practice of screening potential buyers by race would later be outlawed with the signing by President Lyndon B. Johnson of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The neighborhood isn't as self-sufficient nowadays, Rojas said. The grocery stores, ice cream shops, butcher shops and many other neighborhood-sustained businesses are gone.

Partially filling the void left by those departures are bodegas and sandwich shops.

Owner-occupied homes have become the exception rather than the rule, he said.

Yet Rojas sees no good reason to move. He said his oldest child, Rosalind Rodriguez, lives in Exeter Township, and wanted her parents to build a house on a lot next to hers.

"I got my house paid off, so why mess with my Social Security now?" he said. "Thank God I didn't do it. My wife don't like the outside life. She likes to be near her friends. She can walk to wherever. Her family's over here."

Reading Eagle: Jeremy Drey |
Old newspaper clippings about the area hang on the wall of the Bingaman Park Neighborhood Association in south Reading.

Working as a team

For similar reasons Ruben and Carmen Soto have remained in their neighborhood in the 300 block of South Third Street, across from the Third and Spruce Recreation Center, for 33 years.

Their neighborhood is safe and stable, and the neighbors all know one another and get along.

Many of the homes are owner-occupied, with several of the residents own multiple houses, giving them a measure of control over what goes on in the neighborhood, they said.

It's a well-integrated neighborhood, with Latinos, whites and blacks - neighbors for decades in many cases - all looking out for one another.

"A couple of years ago, we had a big snowstorm and they didn't even plow the street," Ruben Soto said. "We all got together and got the cars out."

One of the neighbors mows the several small backyards on the block.

Ruben Soto, 64, said he came to Reading from Puerto Rico when he was 11. He went to grade school at Tyson-Schoener and middle school at Southwest.

"We all get along," Soto said. "The whole block, everybody gets along with everybody. And Nancy Scott, everyone knows her. I think the whole city knows her."

Scott, 83, has resided in her row home since 1972. After her husband, John, died in 1995, she bought one of her neighbor's homes when it was for sale so her granddaughter could live there.

She acquired another home after a longtime resident bequeathed it to her.

Scott boasts that her block has one of the lowest crime rates in the city because residents are quick to band together when something threatens their peace and security.

In 2015, Scott and her neighbors petitioned City Council to do something about tractor-trailer owners parking their 18-wheelers - dozens of them some weekends - along South Second Street near the recreation center.

After residents took their case to local media outlets, council unanimously adopted an ordinance banning tractor-trailer and other large trucks from being parked on any city street for more than an hour.

"We all work together," Scott said. "If we wouldn't work together this would be another run-down neighborhood."